Apple's senior vice president of services Eddy Cue is working to restructure services management with the aim of focusing more on streaming and advertising, according to a new report from Business Insider.
Cue sees streaming and advertising as areas where there is opportunity for revenue growth, and he has already begun updating the responsibilities of key services executives. Peter Stern, Apple's vice president of services, is no longer handling advertising, giving him more time to focus on video, news, books, iCloud, Fitness+, and Apple One.
Todd Teresi, an advertising vice president at Apple, will instead be taking on more responsibility and has been reporting directly to Cue since the beginning of the year. One of the sources who spoke to Business Insider said that Apple's ad business is now "big enough to live on its own."
Apple recently acquired the rights to Friday Night Baseball after establishing a deal with Major League Baseball, and part of its effort to expand streaming services will include additional sports deals. Rumors indicate that Apple is working to secure the rights to NFL's Sunday Ticket package, and Business Insider says that Apple also wants to get the rights to air NBA games.
Sports content would draw in new viewership for Apple TV+, which Apple has been working to build up since its 2019 launch. Apple still has a limited amount of original content compared to other streaming services, and it is unable to draw the same subscriber numbers as Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+.
Services revenue has been growing steadily over the course of the last several years, and the services category now encompasses Apple TV+, iCloud, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Care+, Apple Arcade, Apple Pay, and more.
In the second quarter of 2022, services brought in $19.8 billion, from $17 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Along with focusing on streaming and advertising, Apple also has plans to introduce new services. There are rumors of a hardware subscription service, and Apple Pay is expanding to include a buy now, pay later feature. Over the weekend, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that Apple has even explored an Instacart-like service that would integrate with nutrition data in the Health app.
